Someone has finally realised how profitable it is to be fat! Oh, now the money will come rolling in for every pound! A bank has finally decided that it's time to officially cash in on the global fight against obesity. That's right, "globesity" has been identified as the next major cash cow (if you'll forgive the pun) for investment bankers to grill and serve up to a hungry public.

In the US, the diet industry is a multibillion dollar industry. There's about a 5% success rate for diets – that's diets and lifestyle changes and anything else you want to call the intentional pursuit of weight loss. That means the market just keeps churning: people lose weight, gain it again, and go right back to the diet industry to search for another solution. Self-loathing is, after all, a renewable resource.

And that's why I'm actually surprised it has taken this long for investment firms to realise that over the next 25 years, the industries to invest in are going to be the industries related to fighting fatness. The diet industry is obvious. But, as more and more people buy special foods (be they organic or fat-free), exercise equipment and medical/pharmaceuticals with weight loss in mind, the more those industries become growth industries. This is how capitalism profits from people's desperation. This is how capitalism benefits when we keep lowering the bar for what is considered fat – and continue to ignore that dieting has some pretty heinous health risks of its own.

So what does this mean for fat people? Or even for people who aren't actually fat? It means that big business and private investors are both going to profit from people hating themselves. Which means, because this is how market expansion works, that more people are going to be encouraged to hate themselves.

Now, there's nothing wrong with eating organic food or with being active. I'm a fat person, not an unreasonable one. But I do object to the market being driven by the energy of people punishing themselves – and, make no mistake, most efforts at weight loss are a form of self-flagellation. We're told to be ashamed of ourselves, so we deny ourselves and tell everyone around us how miserable we are.

Of course, this "mega-investment theme" is going to exist whether people – and by people I mean investment bankers – capitalise on it or not. It is increasingly common for anti-fatness commercial products to benefit from government support, even if that support is unofficial. In the US, for example, the Federal Food and Drug Administration has, in the past, been rather strict when it comes to approving diet drugs – they have been regarded as high-risk, because even the ones that have been approved have resulted in unforeseen long-term side effects (like heart failure. Or death). But the FDA has indicated support for diet drug research – enough so that pharmaceutical companies are banking on their drugs being approved.

And these diet drugs that will be approved will average a less than 5% success rate, just like everything else people do to lose weight. In fact, researchers will call diet drugs a success when test subjects show a 2% weight loss.

I'm sure that there is a lot of money to be made here. But the money depends on the perpetuation of a system that operates on false claims and unreasonable expectations. I want to say that of course people are going to realise this, and these industries are going to grow or fail on their own merits.

But in reality, I suspect these funds are going to make a big fat profit.